Peter O’Toole is reported to say that he lost his faith in God when he came to real­ize that prayer was a mat­ter of his talk­ing to him­self. (Later I heard him say some­thing like this as a char­ac­ter in a movie. Never mind.) The dif­fer­ence here is that I know I’m talk­ing to myself and have agreed to con­tinue this futil­ity after a three-​year hia­tus. Why, I’m not sure. The web­site has been redone at some expense and effort, so it seems like a rea­son­able thing to do.

In the past three years, some sig­nif­i­cant things have hap­pened. Where my art is con­cerned, I had the plea­sure of learn­ing encaus­tic at Arrow­mont (in Gatlin­burg) and later work­ing with Jonathan Tal­bot, America’s pre­mier col­lage artist. He holds work­shops in his stu­dio – as well as in par­tic­u­lar cities. We had him for two days at the Museum of Art in Hick­ory, NC, and could have kid­napped him! He gave me plenty of per­sonal atten­tion and advice; and, as a result, I received a Regional Artist grant through our Burke County Arts Coun­cil. And that has kept me busy.

The grant was for “Twenty Vari­a­tions on a Theme,” the theme being a col­lage that Jonathan cri­tiqued last sum­mer. (You can find it on the web­site as “Whis­pered Mesage.”) I have com­pleted 18 of the 20, and I’m rea­son­able happy with most of them. They will be shown Octo­ber 7th-​November 1st at the Arts Council.

Per­son­ally, I have had and dis­missed can­cer, and I pon­der this fre­quently. About this chap­ter in my life, I don’t know what to say.